My hall of residence sits on the side of Headington Hill facing into Oxford city centre. Consequently we can occasionally be "entertained" late into the night by the noise from college balls in town. One such is tonight. I think it's Mansfield College (one of Headington's councillors' alma mater and the other's former employer incidentally).

College balls are supposed to be governed by an agreement with the City Council as licensing authority that, amongst other things, live bands will finish by 1am and all amplified music outdoors will stop at 3am at the latest. It's still going on as I write. I've never seen why, personally, they are permitted outdoors at all. Clubs and so on get licenses till all hours of the night nowadays of course, but they are at least indoors. And whilst the buildings may throb and hum a bit, there are strict limits on decibels audible outside. And though it's not very nice living near one when they chuck out in the early hours, at least the noise is limited to a big rush at tipping out time rather than being continuous for hours at a great distance. It is unconscionable to me that outdoor music that can be heard from miles away is permitted at all into the early hours, especially in a built up area.

What is more shocking though, given the college concerned's history as a place of education for the Wide Dissenters and other non-conformist Christian folk is the choice of music with which they have decided to keep the rest of the city awake. There's been some kind of rap artist (or hip-hop perhaps I don't know the difference and they're both just as bad) on for the last hour yelling obscenities about doing nasty things to one's female parent. Is it any wonder the "bluds in da 'hood" think it's okay to be anti-social?

The nice man from the council is on the case. As the environmental health officer on call tonight to deal with noise nuisances and such things he was not made aware that there was any late night event on tonight, which I find astonishing. I managed to find out through Google whose ball it was and let him know.

Ah - it seems just now to have stopped. And in its place, at 03:50, there are a few rockets being set off somewhere - illegal after 23:00 under the Fireworks regulations passed in 2004 but obviously incapable of being enforced at all. Oh well, maybe now I can get some sleep.

UPDATE: Just got a call from the EHO dealing with it. When he arrived the live "band" was still on and has been pulled off "early". The organisers could not name anyone in licensing that they were liaising with and did not know about the rules agreed for running college balls. These are clearly not working then. It was 800 people, so well above a Temporary Events Notice threshold. And I've found the license issued now.

It seems that you can maybe get away with having very wide ranging general license activities that cover you the rest of the year, and when it comes to your college ball or similar, you maybe just need to get an extension to any bit of it you are not already covered for - in this case the supply of alcohol after 02:00 which is when their usual weekend booze license finishes - they're already covered for live music performances from midnight to midnight Sunday to Saturday! So maybe there is no way of actually controlling these sort of events any longer.

It may be time for college authorities just to tell people to shove off and go hire an indoor venue for these events.

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